Working with agile deadlines - Monte Carlo cloud solution available

[Johan Brodin]

How do you stay loyal to the principal of agile development in an organization having deadlines?

This is a problem statement I have been struggling with in my own organization. To address this I have created the cloud solution agilemontecarlo.com that drives visibility to all stakeholders using Monte Carlo simulations. It is a complement to your issue tracking system also supporting direct import of Jira data.

The solution drives a lot of value in my teams and if you also are struggling on this topic you can take it for a spin. All feedback on this topic is highly appreciated!

[Ron Jeffries]

Oops, this was an ad. My bad, sorry.

Ron Jeffries

ronjeffries.com

I'm really pissed off by what people are passing off as "agile" these days.

You may have a red car, but that does not make it a Ferrari.

  -- Steve Hayes

[Pierre Neis | We&Co]

Curious question. Personally I don´t expect to be loyal to a simulation, I expect to stay loyal to a higher purpose, a vision.

Monte Carlo is a tool and only a tool. A simulation tries to show up trends as an expectation.

Agile is about collecting data as a result and take adequate decision based on outcomes and not the other way around.

Now working with deadlines is a good thing if you are not in non-empirical Research only and that´s why we use sprints/iterations/cycle times/feedback loops.

As a conclusion, in complex adaptive systems (agile), diversity is key and now if your principal of agile development has some concerns on loyalty, it´s perhaps that (s)he only uses the brand of agile.

PierreNEIS
Senior Lean Agile Coach | Associate
M: +352 / 661 727 867
UK: +44 / 203 239 52 60
wecompany.me | You can book me

Actually Scrum Coach for S4HANA/Hybris Billing @ SAP SE

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[John Miller]

Every Sprint is a deadline to inspect and adapt.

Monte Carlo in a complex domain with little historic data on performance (at a new team/product)? Will that work? 

John

[Ram Srinivasan]

Monte Carlo is a great tool for complicated domain, not complex

Most risk management tools, used for modelling with commercial products, such as @risk or Monte Carlo simulation, have been developed as problem-solving tools [84,85] but are silent on how to assemble the requisite expertise, knowledge and social capital to be able to effectively use those tools. These tools, while highly appropriate in simple/standard or complicated situations as argued by Snowden in his Cynefin Framework [16,17], are not appropriate for complex or chaotic situations where use of 'best practice' tools is often dangerous because they support delusions of control in highly unordered situations. Uncertainty presents different challenges to risk because while risk can be known and anticipated (highly relevant in simple/standard or complicated situations), uncertainty throws project team members and leaders into the unknown.

Source - Understanding Collaboration in Integrated Forms of Project Delivery by Taking a Risk-Uncertainty Based Perspective

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[mheusser]

>

>How do you stay loyal to the principal of agile development in an organization having deadlines?

>

Well, two hard thoughts here.

First of all, the organization didn't really have deadlines when they were waterfall, right? I mean, you were late all the time. You could explore the thought processes behind that.

Second, SCRUM IS AWESOME FOR DEADLINES. Assuming you don't know exactly what you are building to start with, you promise to deliver working software in two week increments. Aside from "light switch projects", that are binary, on or off, one or zero (such as an ERP upgrade or some government compliance by a deadline work), Scrum SOLVES all your deadline problems.

So that leaves the light switch.  Except, what did the organization do when it was waterfall? You can solve that the same way.

Asked and answered,

--heusser

[scott.duncan]

At least all the places where I have worked, it wasn't the deadline that was the problem.  It was the combination of a deadline and a fixed scope that was expected to be all done by the deadline.  To quote one product manager: "I just need it all done by...."  Now the way waterfall projects seemed to handle deadlines was overtime and/or add more bodies (the Mythical Man-Month be damned).  I don't think either of those are recommended agile practices.  Of course, that usually did not really help get it all done on time, but I looked like people gave it a good "try."

[Johan Brodin]

Thx for your thoughts!

Unfortunately the organisation has always been deadline driven independent of it was using Waterfall or Agile. My take after working for a quite many companies is that deadlines are always in play independent on R&D process.

If you are in a business that you can deliver customer software after each sprint I completely agree to your statement on scrum. However in our case we deliver software to business on a quarterly cadence and the agilemontecarlo.com solution drives for us the needed visibility to all stakeholders, so that we both can be flexible adjusting scope as well creating the overview so we can mitigate obstacle on the way.

We as a R&D organisation is pumping out working software after each sprint however so the quarterly cadence is not a R&D limitation rather a business and unless you are a online startup my experience is that most other companies the same challenge...

[Johan Brodin]

I completely agree with your statement!

Increasing visibility on where you are in a agile context would put you in a better position managing deviations from overtime, more bodies, scope changes.... And maybe most importantly make all your stakeholders aware of that the project is struggling in a early phase instead of just delaying in the end!